'Privatisation premium': UK taxpayers shell out £200bn to shareholders of utilities and services

The public has paid almost £200bn to the shareholders who own key British industries since they were privatised, research reveals.

- Matthew Taylor Sandra Laville

The transfer of tens of billions of pounds to the owners of privatised water, rail, bus, energy and mail services comes as families face soaring bills, polluted rivers and seas, and expensive and unreliable trains and buses.

As a result, citizens have been paying a “privatisation premium” of £250 per household per year since 2010 alone, the analysis found.

Recent focus has been on the privatised water industry, which has run up long-term debts of £73bn and paid out dividends of £88.4bn in the past 34 years at the same time as overseeing record sewage spills, according to the latest figures.

But for the first time, the thinktank Common Wealth has drawn together the haemorrhaging of billions of pounds to shareholders across four key sectors - energy, transport, water and mail - most of which were privatised in the 1980s and 1990s by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. The selloff of these key industries has “led to a historic transfer of wealth”, with at least £193bn having been paid out to shareholders, private equity funds and foreign holding companies since 1991, according to the Who Owns Britain report.

The fallout from the privatisation has created today's “ripoff Britain”, said Mathew Lawrence, the director of Common Wealth, adding that the privatisation promise of “competition, cheap investment and lower bills” had instead delivered “corporate monopolies, inadequate investment and rising bills”.